Note: I am posting my old blog entries from elsewhere on the internet. This entry was originally posted on 4/10/08.
From time to time, I will be posting about what I’m working on as part of my new job.
(the original image here was lost but here’s a similar one)
This is the Mars Phoenix lander test hardware – a full scale, working version of the lander that allows us to test out instruments and software to understand how everything works and to work out as many kinks as we can before we get to Mars. There’s a pulley system on the ceiling attached to the robot arm to correct for the change in gravity.
“My” instrument is the TECP (thermal electrical conductivity probe) mounted at the end of the robot arm (the light box sticking down. The dark grey thing is the scoop). It has four needles on the end that get stuck in the ground and heated or have an electrical charge applied to so we can measure physical properties of the soil. I spent two days in Tucson watching the ops team moving the arm around and placing the TECP in soil to see how our measurements changed, and to figure out the best way to do this during the mission. We also tested out some of the programming blocks to command the instrument.